Robert Sapolsky Quotes

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

I don't like it when people spout about the popular opinion just to make it louder.

While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.

Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

The mob begins to think and reason. Poor reptiles!

The opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed.

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

I'm a sheep when it comes to opinions; I will change my mind and jump on the bandwagon.

Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it.

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

I hate driving a bandwagon.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

Everyone's like sheep on social media; like, one person starts making noise, and everyone's like, 'Hey, yeah!' and then you got a whole bunch of people making noise at you.

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.